Graduated with a BFA in Communication Design from SUNY Buffalo. Honestly, I feel like everything I know now I've learned through real world experience/self-learning, but I got the piece of paper so I should probably mention it.
Figma is the love of my life, but I'm also proficient in the Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch if the need ever arises. I also love to use tools like Webflow, UserTesting, Fullstory, Heap, Sigma, and Optimizely in my practice. You name it, I've probably tinkered with it because I can't help myself.
It's been (and still is) a whirlwind since I became head of design at Teachable... hit me up to find out more about what I've been up to!
Spent a year drinking from the firehose to learn our product and our customers, improving our design-ops, and building features to help creators grow their businesses on Teachable.
Highlights reel: Tax-inclusive pricing, enrollment caps, student referrals, revamped affiliate program (including affiliate application).
- Advocated for democratized data tooling to increase experimentation and data fluency to improve decision making.
- Introduced new roll out strategies to enable teams to bring customer value more quickly with reduced risk.
- Introduced design planning methodologies to help pods balance discovery and solutioning.
- Created primary and secondary research templates to guide pods through nimble discovery processes.
Left Refi conversion at an all time high.
Overhauled CommonBond’s refinance application, which has led to a 49.6% lift in our holy grail metric, same day SCPA to HCPA conversion since 2019.
Launched a full-fledged component system.
Designed a component system that helped streamline collaboration between designers and developers. Since it's launch, we achieved better efficiency, consistency, and scalability in all of our product initiatives.
Led internal accelerator program.
Led a 6-month user research project to help determine the strategic direction for a new financial product.
Survived an in-house rebrand.
Led the creation of a rebranded digital design system and product marketing website, and scaled that system to all of our apps... in two months. (case study)
Needed a break from the full-time grind, so I took a year to do some photography residencies, travel, and freelance.
Freelance highlight:
Designed the UX for Rose & Abbot’s custom skincare quiz, which formulates a custom moisturizer based on the users skin type, behavior, and lifestyle. (case study)
Designed custom products for marketing companies to help them with their internal workflows. Most of these products focused on optimizing project management and analytics reporting.
During the last 6-months of my time at Velocidi they shifted the company to be a white-label CDP, and I focused solely on building out an easy to use drag and drop interface for that product.
Designed many responsive websites with custom CMS’s that clients could maintain after launch.
Started my journey with user research.
Lurking behind many beautiful websites is a shitty CMS. A website is as much a product for those maintaining it, as it is for the end user. Because we needed to take time to understand the workflows we were designing for, user interviews became a crucial part of my practice.
Shifted to modular design.
The biggest pain-point we discovered in our research was that templates are too rigid. How might we give more control to people who may not have a ton of technical know-how? Instead of giving them templates, give them parts of templates. And so began my journey into component systems.
Collaborated with local and international development teams to ship desktop and mobile websites for multinational companies. Beyond learning how to build great user interfaces, I also was tasked with doing low level (HTML/CSS) coding on every project, which helped me build excellent foundations. (sizzle reel, if you'd like a laugh)